The Whooping Crane

The trustees of the Madrid Zoo read that there were only thirty-four whooping cranes left in the United States and determined that they must have one before the breed became extinct.

Never mind what Spanish wiles they had to exercise to fulfill their ambition; suffice it to say that a whooping crane was dispatched via airfreight in due course and consigned to the Madrid Zoo.

Alas, when the fool bird arrived at the Madrid Airport, he flatly refused to debark, and the brokenhearted trustees had to return empty-handed to their zoo. The moral of this story is that cranes in Spain stick mainly to the plane.